Photo by Robert Burroughs

Sanford Goodkin: "Zoning is racist. It is elitist."

I wanted to know why Sanford Goodkin never became a developer. He said, "The question usually is asked, ‘If you’re so goddamned smart. Goodkin, how come you’re not a builder?’" His glib, smart-alecky retort is, "Because I’m too goddamned smart.” But Sanford Goodkin also has given this question protracted attention over the last thirty years. He’s asked himself whether he should have become a developer.

In 1971, the Goodkins moved to a rented beach house in Del Mar; Goodkin maintained scaled-down offices for a year or so near the Los Angeles airport.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

"I’ve been given many, many, many opportunities,” he says solemnly, and he adds that he could have made much more money than he has as San Diego’s premier real-estate guru. "I could have made money in pure land speculation," Goodkin asserts, "because knew where all the builders were going to go.” But to spend years waiting for individual building projects to take shape ... With a shrug of his shoulders, he confesses he’d get bored. “I love working with powerful people who are changing the earth! I love that they pay me for my advice.

When Mayor Pete Wilson was making “growth management" a political catchword here, Goodkin was decrying the recommendations of Wilson's growth consultant.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

"I’ve worked for Howard Hughes. I’ve worked for Aristotle Onassis. I’ve worked for Paul Getty," he boasts. "I’ve worked for Texans with horse manure on their boots who owned the world. I know Trammell Crow personally” In Southern California, Goodkin has worked with the men who reshaped such well-known pieces of earth as La Costa. Mission Viejo, Lake Forest, and Rancho Bernardo.

But Goodkin’s love for dishing out advice and opinion isn't limited to rich and powerful recipients who pay for private reports. He writes a weekly newspaper column (for the San Diego Daily Transcript), two monthly columns for builders’ magazines, three regular newsletters, and a steady stream of free-lance articles. He crisscrosses the country delivering, on the average, a speech per week. The welter of opinions touches upon everything from bathroom aesthetics to the federal reserve board’s policies. But Goodkin’s most persistent, most passionate crusade is a defense of builders and developers against the gathering slow-growth momentum. Goodkin insists he doesn’t take this position simply because for so many years developers have provided him with a living. "We need housing for elderly people!” he exclaims, exasperated. "And the only people that are going to build it are builders. They’re an endangered species that must be protected because they’re the only ones that provide housing. And so I therefore put myself on their side."

We are standing in Goodkin's inner sanctum on the fifteenth floor of the Central Savings building, next to Horton Plaza. Two walls of his office are made of glass. Through the western one, the stretch of San Diego Bay from North Island to Point Loma glitters in the sun. Through the northern wall, Goodkin has a front-row view of anything anyone does on the rooftop patio of the Westgate Hotel. Despite the scenic distractions. Goodkin has no trouble commanding attention here. Short and solidly built, he is charming, energetic, and charismatic. Since the late Sixties, he's worn a full beard and mustache, which fifteen, even ten years ago gave him a shaggy, slightly unconventional air. Today, at fifty-nine, his once-black hair is shot with gray, and the beard is as conservatively trimmed as that of the late Sebastian Cabot.

If he now looks solidly respectable, Goodkin insists he remains as iconoclastic as ever. “Go around breaking idols,” he preaches, "because idols are the things that trap people into both theory and dictum.” Goodkin says he doesn’t like calling himself a “real-estate specialist" because "in the age of specialization, it so narrows everything."

Instead, he claims, “My interest is totally renaissance. It has no structure. I have abiding curiosity about everything. I read with a voracious appetite.” He says his father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, infused him at an early age with a passion for history and geography, and even today, "I'm desperate for knowledge. If you’re silly enough or pretentious enough to be a Diogenes, if you love the truth, it’s a never-ending quest. It really is a quest. ‘What the hell is right, and what is wrong?’ And my first quarrel is with human nature. That’s my battle with God "

The quest has its monastic elements. Goodkin says he rises every morning by 3:00 to 3:30. With his energy level at a peak and no phones or people to distract him, he daily apportions time for religion. He reads the Torah and various scholarly interpretations of the Old Testament, but he says he also samples other religious writings: Buddhist, Christian, even Moslem. He fulfills most of his writing commitments in the predawn darkness of his Del Mar home and also tackles a daily reading load that includes the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Economist, the Transcript, the Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal. “And I’m always reading seven or eight books. Always.” His goal is to complete two per week, though he admits he doesn’t always achieve that rate.

Goodkin’s wife of almost thirty-eight years, Frances, says the four most important things in her husband’s life are his family, his religion, his reputation, and his privacy. It was because of the latter that he never wanted to run for public office, Frances says, even years ago in Los Angeles, when the smart money people were whispering seductive hints of what lofty offices Goodkin eventually might win. At the same time, Goodkin goes out of his way to instruct strangers about how much his wife and his religion mean to him. “I am a totally successful person," he told me. adding in the same breath, "I have a great wife.” An even more uxorious example occurred one recent day when Goodkin was lunching with several of his staff members. "Sandy, what’s the meaning of life?” one of them asked in a bantering tone. But Goodkin’s reply was serious and simple: "Frances."

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So he's a man who mixes the very private with the very public. One of his most public exposures came recently when he was invited by the Today show in New York to provide the pro-growth counterweight to the arguments of slow-growth champion Tom Mullaney of the Citizens for Limited Growth (the San Diego organization that is working for a ballot measure that would severely limit the number of annual building permits). Goodkin is no latecomer to the growth versus no-growth debate. A dozen years ago when Mayor Pete Wilson was making “growth management" a political catchword here, Goodkin was decrying the recommendations of Wilson's growth consultant, University of Missouri Professor Robert Freilich. Today Goodkin particularly likes to cite an interview with both men, which ran in a 1977 issue of San Diego magazine. Freilich’s plan called for most of San Diego’s growth to come in the downtown and older neighborhoods, such as North Park and Hillcrest. Goodkin, on the other hand, predicted a rebellion among the residents of such areas. They "will not welcome even moderately dense use of the land to which they are neighbors," Goodkin predicted, foreseeing concerted action against the in-filling. Managed-growth policies in San Diego were already beginning to cause runaway growth in the North County communities, which in turn were developing their own "almost hysterical reaction” against more growth. Instead of halting urban sprawl, Freilich’s plan was responsible for fostering it, Goodkin claimed then — and today he says the events of the last decade have proven him correct.

"You don’t bring in a law professor from Missouri to do growth management in San Diego," he states. Back in the early days of the Freilich plan. Goodkin himself was a newcomer to San Diego, but he at least had built his national reputation as a real-estate marketing expert based in Southern California. Born in New Jersey, Goodkin had come to Los Angeles to attend USC in the immediate postwar years — a watershed in the history of building and real estate, Goodkin says today, looking back.

Before World War II, builders universally were small-time contractors who erected one house at a time. But the war caused several impacts on this tradition. Home building all but ground to a halt as the economy was instead geared to the war effort. And when the war ended, Goodkin says, "the G.l. Bill said, 'Thou shalt have an education, and thou shalt be a home owner.’ And it allowed a person who had never thought about going to school the opportunity to go for no money. Number two. he could buy a house for nothing down for thirty years. And in those days, a house cost something like $9000. So all of a sudden, you had these 20 million returning GIs, and they were eligible to have a home, and you had a government that had money and was looking for ways to keep the economy going, despite the cutback in the war machine.”

Goodkin says all these forces gave birth to a new phenomenon, the merchant builder. "Guys who were in other industries, like the garment industry in New York and Detroit and Chicago, became home builders." Foremost was a New York University dropout named William Levitt, who sent shock waves through the nation’s building industry when he organized the construction almost overnight of a new Long Island community named Levittown. Other builders across the country immediately followed his model and began building whole subdivisions, instead of a single residence at a time. "It was almost like the assembly plant," Goodkin says. "Except the assembly plant was on site. It wasn’t in a factory."

For a good dozen years, demand for their products was so strong that "the mere rumor you had houses meant people came and shoved deposit checks under the door,” says Goodkin. Under such conditions, the new merchant builders had little incentive to produce anything other than cheap, unimaginative structures that had changed little since the days of Lincoln. “The nails were exactly the same!" Goodkin shouts. "Though eventually you did have a stapler. The outhouse was brought indoors, and it became the bathroom inside. They celebrated that for thirty years!" He says when he lectures on this history, some builders, outraged, ask him, “ ‘What are you talking about? The copper tubing is different!’ 'Oh, excuse me. I don’t know what possessed me,’ ’’ Goodkin says, dripping sarcasm. "I’m sure some of the mechanics changed. But from the consumer’s perception, he was looking at the same thing."

He says it wasn’t until the late Fifties that the pressures for change finally built. One important catalyst was television, which allowed Americans by the millions into other people's homes — people like the fictional Cleaver and Ricardo families. "You could identify with them or you could envy them or you could aspire to them," Goodkin says. He points out that television also created the need for a new kind of space within the house — a place where the family could gather to watch the TV. "The living room wasn't really good because the middle class was taught that a living room was the museum piece. It was for guests only." So by the late Fifties, a few canny builders began to build houses containing a new kind of space, the family room, Goodkin began to hear about such rooms when he came up with a radical idea of his own. After obtaining his degree in marketing from USC, he worked for the largest real-estate advertising agency in the United States (the Beverly Hills-based firm of Stiller, Rouse) and then became an assistant to the president of Grandview Building Company, the firm that developed most of Palos Verdes. Goodkin says this happened right when the first real oversupply in housing materialized.

"Builders began to wonder why people weren’t buying their stuff." So Goodkin decided to ask potential buyers directly, a move that he claims no one else had thought of doing before. He would go to Grandview’s model homes, catch prospective buyers on their way out, and ask if they intended to buy. " ‘Oh, which one?’ Well, the Q plan.’ Why?’ ’Well, because it’s got three bedrooms instead of two bedrooms. And it’s got a bath and half instead of one bath.’ Pretty logical answers. Other people would say no. ‘Why not?’ ‘Well! down the street. I can get a house for the same price and it’s got a family room.’ Then I’d bring these answers over to the boss, and he’d say, ‘What the hell is a family room?' And some other guy would always say, ‘Oh, that’s some gimmick they’ve got down there. It's a den! That’s all it is.’ ” But Goodkin says the top boss at Grandview began incorporating the consumer information into newer home models and was pleased to see sales improve.

So Goodkin very tentatively decided to see if he could found a business of his own based on helping builders market their products. Pressure for this kind of service was coming at least as much from lenders as from the builders, he says today. "The one thing about builders is as long as they have financing, they will continue to build. It has nothing to do with the marketplace. But if the builder is borrowing the money, the lender will ask why the builder thinks he’ll be able to sell his houses." Once on his own, Goodkin says, "I started landing clients who turned out to be the biggest builders in L.A. and Orange County. There was no such thing as San Diego in those days."

Sometimes Goodkin would provide the same sort of market research he had pioneered in Palos Verdes. Other times, Frances Goodkin, who helped her husband with the fledgling business, would scrutinize clients’’rtiodel homes for housekeeping aides. "I would say, ’Where’s the full-length closet for the broom and the mop?’" Goodkin also worked to help builders merchandise their products better. "People buy on two planes,” Goodkin explains. "One is analytical, and the second is emotional.” On that second, emotional plane, buyers are heavily influenced by factors such as color, texture, and curiosity, and Goodkin insisted that builders use such factors in their model homes to hook potential buyers subliminally. Sometimes Goodkin would direct interior decorators and landscapers in this effort, while other times, he generated ideas himself. For example, Frances Goodkin recalls one model in which prospective clients were consistently failing to notice and enter the master bedroom suite. Goodkin advised the builder to put a mannikin in the master bathroom shower and turn the water on. The noise attracted people, and the thought that someone was showering in the model bathroom startled them — though they quickly realized the little joke and would frequently comment on it afterward.

Goodkin's work with developers soon ranged from giving this sort of practical advice to the almost godlike task of drawing up complex plans for whole communities to be built over periods of twenty years. Goodkin shrinks from taking too much credit for the master planning work. "It’s unfair to the developer" he says. "The developer is the genius. He’s the one who either listens or doesn't listen. The developer makes it happen," not the consultant, Goodkin stresses. Still, he says he significantly influenced the developers of some of Southern California’s better-known new towns. "I named Lake Forest [in Orange County). I gave it the lake. And I kept the engineers from cutting the trees down." Goodkin says he also did the whole study upon which Mission Viejo’s development was based. "I wrote the document which said it should have these three different villages right away, and here’s the price range, and here’s the houses specifically: size of yards, width of frontages, a tree planted in front of each house. I’m probably responsible for the health of the olive tree industry."

By the late Sixties, Goodkin’s operations had grown to include four corporations run by a staff of fifty-six people who filled half a floor of one of the high-rise towers in Century City. The Goodkins were still living in Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley, where the smog levels and commute into Los Angeles were growing intolerable. Frances Goodkin says her husband by then was also spending nine-tenths of his time rounding up business, rather than doing the teaching and writing he enjoyed. So in 1971, the Goodkins moved to a rented beach house in Del Mar; Goodkin maintained scaled-down offices for a year or so near the Los Angeles airport, but in 1973, he closed these and worked in Del Mar with only a secretary to assist him. "It was deja vu," Frances says. "It was '57 again. And Sandy said he never wanted to get as big [as he had been in Los Angeles] again. It gets away from you."

The Del Mar business nonetheless began to grow, and Frances says her husband also began to re-experience a problem that had plagued him in Los Angeles: an ongoing pressure to train new people. She says Goodkin typically would take young people and inculcate them with his marketing expertise. "At one time, almost every major marketing person in the industry had learned the research business from our company. People used to call it the University of Goodkin," Frances says. But after a few years, when the new experts had ascended as far as they could within Goodkin's organization, they would strike out on their own. Frances says that’s a major reason why her husband finally last year accepted an offer to merge with the accounting giant Peat Marwick Main. Goodkin’s staff eventually will have a chance to move to other cities and become partners in the huge parent company, though for now, Goodkin has tenaciously held the group together in San Diego.

"People come from other offices of Peat Marwick, and they look at us and say, ’Wow, these guys are different from us. It’s like a family around here,’ ’’ rhapsodizes Fred Pierce, one of Goodkin’s senior account executives. If Pierce were to exchange his no-nonsense business apparel for shorts and a T-shirt and to tousle his well-coiffed hair, he could go undercover on any high school campus, he looks that young and fresh-faced. He started working for Goodkin five years ago. while getting a business degree from San Diego State. Now he’s twenty-five. With some pride, he mentions that he typically works from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., six days a week. "I think I’ve probably handled in the neighborhood of 500 real-estate projects in my time here!" he says with contagious enthusiasm. "I don’t think you could find another person at my age with the experiences that I’ve had. And it’s been because of working with Sandy. We sit in the boardroom with the chairmen of the board of the most important real-estate development companies in the nation!"

Today Goodkin says, "I manage the inspirational, the spiritual level of this group." He personally does very little of the research "unless it’s really leading edge, where there’s a lot of creativity. Like, I'm working on a large luxury project for the [San Diego) convention center. And on another one in the Golden Triangle that I think has a chance of being wonderful" Goodkin also contributed to studies his group just completed for the development of 25,000 acres in Las Vegas. "It’s a new town that’s just being invented. Well, that’s incredible!"

But he spends as much of his time on the crusading speeches and articles. No builder pays him for this work, he asserts. Goodkin says he simply believes that important moral issues are involved, that limiting growth in a heavy-handed manner (such as the initiative backed by Citizens for Limited Growth) will hurt both newcomers and longtime San Diegans.

Goodkin’s recent writings are laden with figures that argue that this is already happening. "Two million households that would have been able to afford a home in 1980 cannot afford one today," he reported recently. The average resale price of a home in San Diego has now climbed to over $146,000, while the new-home price rose thirty-one percent from November 1986 to about $168,000, Goodkin points out. At the same time, new-housing building permits fell by almost fifty-three percent from October 1986 to 1987.

Goodkin says neither he nor most builders argue against all controls on zoning and land use. "I’m not laissez-faire," he states, and he adds that builders ("unless they’re just completely blind") see the downside of rapid growth. "They’re also members of the community. They drive. And they see that there is something wrong, something very wrong. They’re talking to their spouses. They’re talking to their kids. They’re talking to their customers.’’

But, Goodkin continues, the builders don’t want to be punished as the perpetrators of our current problems, as if they caused the population to increase. He partly blames the building community for failing to educate the public at large better. "For years I’ve begged builders to place a sticker at the entry of their homes showing the breakdown of all the taxes [impact fees] placed on this one home, so that the consumer would be educated," Goodkin wrote in a recent column. He says builders have always responded that they don’t want people to know what they make per home. But that’s a short-sighted answer, Goodkin contends. "People think that the builder makes twice as much as he does anyway."

Goodkin in fact feels that slow-growth proponents don’t understand the builders whatsoever. "To the slow-growther, builders cry all the way to the bank." People somehow completely forget that a builder "built their own house... their shopping center... their office building or the plant that they’re working in." And opponents of growth "have neither comprehension nor compassion for the difficulty of building. They feel these guys are rapists to begin with. They come onto a piece of land, and they cut down all the trees. They fill in the canyons, they plunder the hilltops. They [growth opponents] think, ’What the hell do I care what their difficulties are? In fact, I wish there were more.’ ’’ Goodkin further sees no evidence that slow-growth advocates want to understand their opponents. "They’re sensing power. They smell blood. They’re on a roll.

They don’t have to understand. Builders are the enemy — the enemy that apparently is assembling cars in the garages they built and that’s responsible for the intercourse that goes on in the bedrooms they built. It’s the ancient cry of battle: Dehumanize your enemy. And I look at it from a sense of community, and I say, ’Tyranny in the name of environmentalism is still tyranny.’ ’’

Behind part of the antibuilder sentiment, Goodkin sees an ignorance about land use and density. "Density is the voters’ biggest ignorance," Goodkin wrote recently. Although voters tend to think of builders wanting to cram large numbers of people on small lots, "Builders hate to build density above the traditional single family, four to the acre,” Goodkin contends. "Because most people want their apple pie and white picket fence. Profit is assured by building single family, not density. Density is a consequence of land pricing, not builders’ or buyers’ preference!” People need to look to such dense urban models as Amsterdam, San Francisco, Paris, all cities with great charm. “You can retain privacy in density,” Goodkin insists. For a local example, he cites the very expensive Meridian condominium project downtown. “It’s very dense. And yet if you’re in one unit, you don't know there's somebody next door.”

Goodkin concedes that he’s arguing against a deeply rooted American prejudice. "In any zoning situation, people have a prejudice toward singlefamily houses. They don’t want anything else.” He says his own attitude toward single-family homes has changed over the years, as land has been claimed by development. "A singlefamily home is a luxury. It’s the worst use in the world for land which is in short supply. God has not been making any land, except for a few volcanoes somewhere. Then we say on one hand there's land that should never be built on because it's unsafe. There’s other land which is environmentally sensitive. There’s some land that cannot be built on because of mountains and ravines.

So now from what looked like almost an unlimited amount of land, you’re down to very precious few acres. Why build on those at all? Because people need housing. But we should look at all the options for what type of housing it should be. I’m not talking about skyscrapers in the middle of the desert, but I'm saying almost that. If we could keep a lot of the land free by going high, what is wrong with that? People say, ‘Well, I’ve got children, and they can’t play in the backyard.’ Well, that’s too goddamned bad, because we’re going to have some of the greatest schools you’ve ever seen, with all kind of wonderful playgrounds. Do they have to be hermits and play in their own backyards?” Goodkin also decries what he perceives to be another underlying motivation, besides ignorance, for the rampant anti-growth sentiments: an antisocial selfishness. "Zoning is to keep people out of the goddamned neighborhood. It’s racist. It is elitist. That’s why zoning was created.

Today with the new ethic or syndrome, I now call myself an environmentalist so I don't have to worry about being called a racist, but the two things are very related. It's human nature. I've spent my lifetime studying human nature. And with all the protests about how wonderful I am, in terms of Woodman, don’t touch that tree,’ they [slow-growth advocates) are also saying, Well, I got mine.' ”

Goodkin says one can see an extreme example of this up in Oregon, where one of his three children lives. "My son brings it up, not me. We talk and I say, 'Gee, a lot of guys up here look like they're mountain people. Like, I wouldn't want to live next to them. They look antisocial!’ And he says, ‘Dad, they are antisocial. They hate people. They resent people and particularly the guys that came out of California to get away from people. That's why the crimes up here are bad. They’re not against property, they’re against people.' Human nature is the same everywhere!' I got mine. You try to get a piece of yours, and the gangplank comes up, unless it's somebody I want. This is my turf, and oh, by the way, my turf is extended now. It's whatever I can control politically.' Well, that stinks!"

To the person who protests, "You can’t just allow the builders to do anything." Goodkin exclaims, "You’re right. We're not talking about that." Instead, he suggests, limitations on building should be hashed out, issue by issue, within the political arena, despite its limitations. "The process has to begin with the two sides listening to each other. With each side saying, ‘Okay, what are the solutions?’ One solution is we're going to absolutely have a hundred percent moratorium for six months. Nothing can get built. We’ll only allow what's under construction. But some guy says, Well, wait a minute. What do you mean by “under construction?" It’s cost me $2 million to dig a trench. For $2 million, isn’t that under construction?' 'Oh no, 'cause you haven’t got timbers up yet.’ So nothing’s simple. Anybody who would say, 'Well, we’re gonna have a moratorium for six months’ doesn’t understand the law of economics. Because what he’s created is inflation. He's hurting some builders, yeah. But he’s hurting the consumer ultimately.”

Goodkin says, "We’ve got to think through all these things. You don’t just get angry about traffic on the freeway. You know, for every action, there’s a reaction. Say the action is a petition, an initiative, that subtracts thousands of building permits from the city supply. What is that going to do? Is it going to remove traffic tomorrow? No! Well, address yourself to the traffic, then.” He points to the example of traffic in Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympics. "Even though one-third more cars were in Los Angeles during the Olympics, traffic flowed marvelously. It did not take a technological solution. That is, it was a voluntary change of habit, rather than some mechanical breakthrough." Goodkin asserts that San Diego leaders could take similar action. "Just visit all the employers where the traffic works and say, ‘Do all your employees have to go to work at the same time?’ They say, 'Gee, I’ve never thought about it.’ 'Well, let’s think about it. What we’d like to do is in this zone twenty-five percent will let their people come in at 7:30, twenty-five percent at 7:45, then at 8:00 and 8:15. Would that be bad?’ ‘No.’ ‘And could you give some kind of incentive for your employees to use carpools? Use a computer to sort people according to enumeration districts or postal zones or something like that, and say, “Gee, we’ve got fifty-seven people living here. Could some of you come to work together?....

Goodkin concedes that fundamental attitudes must change before the use of cars in Southern California changes dramatically. "If I said to a developer client, 'We’re going to be different. We’re going to put together this Shangri-la, and we ain’t going to allow any cars in there, or we’re going to make it difficult for people to own cars by not having big garages — but we’re going to make up for that by having more recreational areas and all that; he would die. Absolutely. Because people are full of garbage when it comes to their car. They love their car. They worship it. It’s God. It’s killer God. It’s Thor.”

Goodkin says the first small deviation from that pattern nonetheless has begun to show up in areas like the Golden Triangle, with its system of pedestrian byways. He says another new development in Los Angeles County called Valencia boasts a similar pedestrian network. “And yet they were ignoring it in their advertising. And I said, 'Hey, don’t ignore that! That is so great!’ It’s gotta be a coming trend, because of the anti-growth thing. Because right now we don’t plan for people, we plan for automobiles. If you talk to a city planner, his problem is where to put all the cars. It’s terrible.”

Goodkin says instead we should be asking, "How do we subtract the car? Let’s not say we can’t do it. Let’s come up with something, as if we’re doing a theme park. When you go through Disneyland, do you ever see a car? Noooo. Are people happy? Very. Hmmmmm. Is there a lesson there? You get people out of their cars as soon as possible. If a person is driving through the Wild Animal Park, he’s not looking at the animals. So you get him out of the car as fast as possible. He walks or goes into a monorail. What is wrong with a monorail?”

Goodkin argues that “most people make the mistake of thinking that what is occurring is what is going to occur. And very seldom is that true. Things change."

He can look back over his own thirty-year career to a world so different that it's hard to recapture it in one's mind. In the coming thirty years, we’ll see more of the same, he insists. "There's no way you can be the way you are today. So what do we want to be? The first guy who puts his hand up and says, We want to be the way we are today' is wrong. If you asked the same question twenty years ago, that same guy would put up his hand and say, 'The way we are today.’ If you said. Well, wait a minute. Do you know we’re dredging the bay out; we’re going to create a place called Mission Bay.’ ‘Don’t want that! You’ll kill all the birds.’ ’Well, what about the stench?’ ‘You’ll kill all the birds. There are things living under that stench.’ In other words, he never changes his mind at all. He thinks more of the eagle soaring and the snail darter than of people. He loves Mother Nature, but he doesn’t love Mother’s children. I have no use for that person.”

That person’s model, Goodkin asserts, “is nostalgia. You have the newcomer who says, 'Gee, I’ve heard how it used to be Why can’t it be that way again?’ And the oldtimer who says, ’Well, I was here. And I remember I could go from downtown to Oceanside in eleven minutes and fourteen seconds at thirty-five miles an hour.’ And neither one of them knows what the hell he’s talking about. One is in love with the past and the other is in love with illusion. Neither one is saying, ‘Look, we can’t put barbed wire around the city. How can we accommodate the people?’"